outing.

Immediately on his return, the speech-making schoolmaster was met by a
very sudden and unexpected request that he would allow himself to be
nominated for the State legislature. Every state of the Union has its
own separate little legislative body, consisting of two houses; and it
was to the upper of these, the Senate of Ohio, that James Garfield was
asked to become a candidate. The schoolmaster consented; and as those
were times of very great excitement, when the South was threatening to
secede if a President hostile to the slave-owning interest was elected,
the contest was fought out almost entirely along those particular lines.
Garfield was returned as senator by a large majority, and took his seat
in the Ohio Senate in January, 1860. There, his voice was always raised
against slavery, and he was recognized at once as one of the ablest
speakers in the whole legislature.

In 1861, the great storm burst over the States. In the preceding
November, Abraham Lincoln had been elected President. Lincoln was
himself, like Garfield, a self-made man, who had risen from the very
same pioneer labourer class;--a wood-cutter and rail-splitter in the
backwoods of Illinois, he had become a common boatman on the
Mississippi, and had there improved his mind by reading eagerly in all
his spare moments. With one of those rapid rises so commonly made by
self-taught lads in America, he had pushed his way into the Illinois
legislature by the time he was twenty-five, and qualified himself to
practise as a barrister at Springfield. His shrewd original talents had
raised him with wonderful quickness into the front ranks of his own
party; and when the question between the North and South rose into the
region of practical politics, Lincoln was selected by the republicans
(the anti-slavery group) as their candidate for the Presidency of the